Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Newcastle in 1849

Newcastle in 1849

1849
Watercolour on paper
Donated by Sir William Dixson, 1951
DGA 10

John Rae, a Scottish-born public servant and administrator, was a keen amateur artist, art critic and lecturer in art and philosophy. Arriving in Sydney in 1839, he quickly established himself as a leading public figure in Sydney’s cultural life. One of his best friends was the English-born landscape artist John Skinner Prout: together they published Sydney Illustrated, with Prout providing the illustrations and Rae the text.

Rae seemed to enjoy fiddling with technology and new ideas. While he did not have the skills of a professional artist, he was keen to play with lenses and what he described as cameras in order to project landscape views onto sheets of paper, which he could then trace. In this way, he could make accurate drawings of views; all he then had to do was colour them appropriately. Beginning in the late 1840s with a series of watercolours of Sydney, he then explored further afield with panoramic views of Wollongong, Newcastle and later rural properties such as Sir John Hayes’ property at Welaregang.

But Rae’s system struggled with perspective: the setup of the lenses meant that there was always a distinctive curvature in the foreground of his panoramas. Nonetheless these panoramas were valued for the information they contained, and in 1883 this view of Newcastle was exhibited in the Calcutta International exhibition, alongside a photographic panorama taken in the late 1870s to demonstrate the development which had taken place over the previous 30 years.

A weakness for gadgets

John Rae loved fiddling with new technologies, and in the 1840s it was photography in particular that captured his interest. The invention of photography was announced in France in 1839: the first recorded photograph taken in Australia was 1841, although the actual image itself has not survived. In 1847 Rae wrote to his friend, the artist John Skinner Prout:


"My present weakness is the construction of a camera, which will give me still more notions of pictorial representations – light, shade, colours and perspective. I use a lens of 2 feet focus, and hope to make the machine so portable as not to exceed the size of your hat. I hope in the course of the summer to take a few sketches from nature by means of my camera."*


Footnotes

* John Rae to John Skinner Prout, 17 August 1847, John Rae Letterbook, ML MSS 6998, p 669

Promoting the colony

By the late 1840s when John Rae made this view, panoramas had a long history in Australia: with their emphasis on detail and information, many locals perceived them as an ideal way to promote the colonies. They saw them as a kind of investment prospectus delivered to European audiences, who colonists felt, would be amazed at the extent of development and the sophistication of local infrastructure. This, it was hoped, would impress upon Europeans that the colony had far outgrown its convict origins.